The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior but provided by the disclosed embodiments. Some of such contributions may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions will be apparent from their context.
In modern communication and computer networks, management of network infrastructure equipment, such as personal computers, servers and printers, is an important part of the operation of the network. In a large network comprising tens and hundreds of devices the management of devices requires a systematical approach to be efficient or even possible. Today, the management of infrastructure is performed using standards like the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Netconf. These protocols enable the monitoring and possible control of devices connected to the network in a controlled and efficient manner. These methods work well in an Ethernet-based office information technology (IT) environment comprising devices having processor power. Power consumption, traffic overhead and implementation complexity are not a concern in this environment.
Enterprises are rapidly connecting Machine-to-Machine (M2M) systems into their backend IT infrastructure for e.g. energy monitoring, remote machine monitoring, building automation and asset management. M2M systems often include very simple, cheap, battery powered devices connected via deep low-bandwidth access networks. The scale of devices in an M2M network is also massively different, including even up to millions of devices in a single management domain.
Traditional IT system network management solutions and existing protocols like SNMP are too inefficient and complex to managing M2M systems end-to-end.
Prior art machine-to-machine systems have solved this problem by building monolithic, vertical technology all the way from the device to the backend server, often employing proprietary protocols. ISO/IEC 14908-based protocol (LONtalk) is an example of such a system. ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization and IEC for the International Electrotechnical Commission.
More recently, as machine-to-machine devices have become IP enabled, systems have become more open by using IP as a networking protocol, but in order to keep the system efficient, they employ proprietary protocols.
Finally, some devices are starting to be connected to the web; however this is now done using standard HTTP/TLS/TCP technology, which is not suitable for constrained devices or networks. Here HTTP is the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, TLS Transport Layer Security and TCP the Transmission Control Protocol.
These solutions are not designed for deep networks, and extremely large numbers of devices with small processing power and minimum power consumption.